Or does your PR get rejected for not building on the private build servers?

Try suricata-test-builders, an unofficial set of Docker and Vagrant build environments that perform a variety of builds across a variety of Linux distributions (with Docker) and other operating systems with Vagrant and VirtualBox.

The idea is to run these builders from your current working directory to exercise a variety of build environment including CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenBSD with an option of providing you a shell for further debugging.

As Docker and Vagrant/VirtualBox are used it is limited to x86 and x64 systems that can run under Docker and VirtualBox. Most testing has been done on Linux, but it should also work on MacOS provided VirtualBox, Vagrant and Docker are installed and working.

The latest builds of EveBox support an embedded SQLite database that allow it to be used without Elastic Search for lighter loads. The SQLite support was added to support two use cases that may be of interest to some.

One Shot Mode

One shot mode is the loading of a single eve.json into a temporary database and allowing the user to work with it, then cleaning up on exit. Probably most useful for loading up the Suricata log file after running over a PCAP, or just trying out EveBox for the first time. Example usage:

./evebox oneshot /path/to/eve.json

If all goes well your browser should eventually open up and display the EveBox Inbox.

Self Contained Mode

For lack of a better name, self contained mode is the usage of EveBox without any external dependencies. This is suitable for lighter loads when running EveBox on the same machine that is running Suricata. Example usage:

./evebox server --datastore sqlite --input /var/log/suricata/eve.log

The idea here is just a simple way to get a GUI for your Suricata events without messing around with any configuration or databases. However, you may want to create a configuration file and setup a retention period to keep your SQLite database size in check (more documentation coming soon).

If you have multiple Suricata instances, and believe the load to be light, you can configure an EveBox agent to send events to the SQLite enabled server, but your mileage will vary as you add more load.

Using Elastic Search?

If using Elastic Search the agent and/or the –input option may still be interesting as alternatives for shipping eve logs to Elastic Search, and open up future options for dealing with the real time event feeds from your Suricata instances.

I’ve been asked a few times now for “stable” APT and Yum repositories as the current ones are marked “development”, in fact they contain the packages created on Travis-CI runs of the master branch.

So I’ve added stable repos for Yum and Apt. For the short term they still contain builds out of the master branch, but uploaded by me instead of the output CI, and they will transition to only tagged releases after the next release, 0.6.0 which I will probably tag soon.

I’ve added a new tool to my idstools package to convert the packets (or the payloads) found in Suricata eve logs to a pcap file.

To just grab the script, download eve2pcap.py and make it executable, or to install the complete idstools package (will install as idstools-eve2pcap):

pip install –upgrade idstools

Usage is pretty simple:

./eve2pcap.py -o output.pcap /path/to/eve.json

Or to use the payload field instead of the packet field:

./eve2pcap.py -o output.pcap –payload /path/to/eve.json

For straight packet conversion no dependencies are required other than Python and libpcap. Scapy is used for conversion of the payload field, so make sure to install it before trying to convert the payload.

It is also important to note that eve logs do not contain all the information to recreate the packet headers, so when converting payloads to pcap the headers are “manufactured” and may not always produce the best packet for the payload, so YMMV.

Verify That Suricata is Running

Even though we have not downloaded any rules yet, Suricata will still log HTTP requests, DNS requests, TLS certificates and SSH connection by default. These can be observed by monitoring /var/log/suricata/eve.log.

tail -f /var/log/suricata/eve.log

Download Some Rules

To get the most out of Suricata you will want to download some rules. The Emerging Threats Open rules are freely available and can be installed with the following commands:

I didn’t mean to do it, but I created yet another tool to download IDS rules, with a specific focus on Suricata. Like some other people, I’ve always used my own scripts for downloading rules instead of using existing tools, and I finally pulled some of that together and dropped it into my idstools project.